68	THE FATE OF MAN
radical reforms of society are accomplished.
Escape from dictatorship is possible only by
moral rebirth and the application of creative
spiritual forces. The old socialist parties are
powerless—they have lost their enthusiasm, be-
come bourgeois, they have been bureaucratized
and are no longer capable of action. In this con-
nection the fate of the German social-democrats
is very revealing. We are entering a period of
great difficulty for human personality, for freedom
of the spirit, for higher culture. And the question
poses itself: can these dictatorships confine them-
selves only to politics and economics, or is it
inevitable that they also become dictatorships of
world-view, of ideas, of the spirit, that is to say,
the denial of all free spiritual life and work and
conscience? In principle the first is possible,
but what actually happens is the second, because
of the decline in Christian faith. And we shall
have spiritual war. It is already taking place in
German Christianity, and it will spread over the
whole world. We must battle against monism,
for dualism, for the reality of the distinction
between the spiritual and the natural-social,
between the world of being and the objectivized
world, between the Church and the State, between
what is God's and what belongs to Caesar,
It is surprising, as I noted above, that absolute
monism, absolute ideocracy, is realizable without